Liberation of Bergen-Belsen: how a lack of protective clothing cost lives

Clothing can kill. So, too, can the absence of personal protective equipment. For decades, the medical establishment has understood the role of fabric in both spreading contagion and guarding against its transmission — but never with greater urgency than 80 years ago.

On April 15 1945, British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle in northern Germany. Shocking scenes awaited behind the barbed wire.

On entry, British personnel found an epidemic of typhus decimating the camp’s surviving population. Thousands of unburied corpses, appallingly overcrowded huts, the absence of running water and chronic emaciation contributed to the rapid spread of this louse-borne disease. So too did unwashed garments into which lice burrowed and deposited their contaminated faeces.

For warmth, some camp inmates removed clothing from corpses, heedless of the danger of contagion. Others feared infection so acutely that they went unclothed rather than risk contamination. Anne Frank died, just weeks before the camp’s liberation, in a state of naked terror.

For military and medical personnel, burying bodies and burning garments was imperative, along with triaging survivors and moving the fittest from the camp’s corpse-strewn huts to a hastily established hospital area. To transform a site of mass death into a place of recovery wasn’t easy. Staff lacked supplies of every sort, substituting newspaper for mackintosh sheeting and commandeering dog bowls for use as bedpans.

Protective clothing was also in desperately short supply. There, too, improvisation was the order of the day. Around 100 British medical students drafted into action at Belsen sported a motley assemblage of British military and appropriated German Wehrmacht apparel. They, like everyone else in the camp, were liberally sprayed with DDT. This pesticide was later proven to be carcinogenic.

Female British Red Cross workers modified their uniforms, ditching regulation skirts. “I always go about in slacks and battle dress, trousers being a greater protection against the louse!” Margaret Ward wrote home to her mother with forced bravado.

Meanwhile, members of the Royal Army Medical Corps, better provisioned than anyone else at Belsen, wore “typhus suits” as they stretchered patients from the huts to the hospital. These outfits – complete with drawstring hoods, gauntlets and gaiters, but no masks – helped keep contagion at bay, though their alien appearance terrified some patients.

British authorities “solved” their protective equipment crisis at Belsen by compelling captured German SS personnel to undertake the most dangerous work. Sometimes, prisoners were given rubberised capes. But more often, as numerous photographs taken by British military photographers attest, German prisoners handled corpses without any protection at all.

Dressed in their SS uniforms, German men and women set to work (under armed guard) removing piles of contaminated clothing and dead bodies from the huts. With uncovered mouths and bare hands, they carried corpses to mass graves.

In April and May 1945, anti-Nazi feelings ran understandably high among allied personnel, particularly those who just participated in the camps’ liberation. Few found anything ethically wrong with the decision to expose German prisoners to a high risk of infection.

War crimes trials, with the prospect of execution for defendants found guilty, awaited SS prisoners. Forcing German camp personnel to confront the deadly consequences of their actions – in the most visceral way possible – struck most uniformed Britons as an entirely warranted form of retribution. A moral corrective for SS prisoners was also a medical expedient made necessary by the camp’s dire shortage of protective equipment.

At Belsen, the consequences were predictable. Seven of the British medical students contracted typhus, though none seemingly died of the disease.

The brunt was borne by the captured enemies. Reuters reported on June 28 1945 that 20 SS guards had “died of typhus before their trials by the war crimes court could be held”, adding that it was “believed that they caught the disease when they were forced to bury the bodies of some of the prisoners”.

Meanwhile, Belsen’s survivors urgently required garments and footwear. Retributive justice played a role here too. British military personnel ordered German civilians in the environs of the camp to surrender clothing, shoes and bedding for use by survivors. Here was postwar redress at its most literal. People stripped of so much by the Third Reich would begin life anew in apparel removed from Germans.

Susan L. Carruthers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.